The #1 Python Solution
Used by Innovative Teams
Get secure, modern Python with advanced dependency management
Download Python
Accelerate your software development with Python from ActiveState. Download and install Python to get started for free.
Trusted by Developers, Proven for the Enterprise
We’re reimagining how you work with Python and virtual environments.
With ActiveState Python, developers get access to:
- Security-first package management
- Automated dependency resolution and easy solutions to dependency conflicts
- Consistent, reproducible environments from dev to production
- Automated builds from source code, including linked C libraries
Python package management that makes developers lives easier
ActiveState Python is powered by the ActiveState Platform. It offers automated dependency management, distributed parallel cloud builds of dependencies from source, team collaboration tools, and a versatile CLI (our State Tool) —all without the need for build engineering or Windows and Linux expertise.
Identify & Resolve Security Vulnerabilities Faster
Shortcut the lengthy remediation process of investigating, rebuilding, retesting, and updating runtime environments. The ActiveState Platform lets you find vulnerabilities, fix them, and automatically rebuild a secure version of your Python environment in minutes, decreasing Mean Time To Remediation (MTTR) from days to hours.
Enterprise-Grade Python Dependency Management
The ActiveState Platform automates dependency resolution, helping to ensure your environment contains known-good sets of dependencies that work together. Can’t resolve a dependency conflict? Let the ActiveState Platform resolve it for you, or at least tell you how to manually solve it yourself.
Versatile CLI – our State Tool
Our all-new, open-source CLI, the State Tool, lets you manage your environment directly from the terminal, easily integrate with your existing CI/CD pipelines, and keep your team synchronized across platforms.
Built Fast from Source
The ActiveState Platform gives you access to a distributed, parallel build system so that even complex development environments can be automatically built and packaged for your OS in record time—straight from source code—giving you all the security assurances and flexibility that comes with it.
Multi-OS Universal Python Package Management
Use the same tooling across platforms to manage all your Python environments. Add, remove, update individual dependencies, or import your requirements.tx so you can get coding quicker.
Revision Control
See a history of all changes to your environment with the ability to revert, fork, and merge changes between versions.
Common Development Environments
Keep teams synchronized with a centrally managed and updated Python environment all team members can share.
Open Source Licensing
ActiveState Python and the modules you install via the command line are licensed under their original licenses.
Virtual Environments
Keep your projects sandboxed on your machine with a cross-platform, universal virtual environment solution that’s quicker and easier to use than venv, but still lets you run multiple versions of Python on your machine without worrying about dependency conflicts.
Ready to give it a try?
You can start right away by installing ActiveState Python via your command line.
See how it works – CLI | See how it works – GUI | Need help? Head here – ActiveState Community Forums | Enterprise Support – Contact Sales
Trusted by Developers, Proven for the Enterprise
Frequently Asked Questions
Both ActivePython and ActiveState Python are 100% compatible with the open source packages you use today, but:
- ActivePython is a pre-built Python distribution that contains a version of Python along with hundreds of popular packages. ActivePython is best suited for those that just want to run a program using Python, rather than use Python for software development purposes.
- ActiveState Python contains a version of Python and a minimum of packages suitable for managing your environment. Once installed, you can then add just the packages your project requires. ActiveState Python is best suited for those that want to develop programs using Python.
The ActiveState Platform is a universal package management solution for Python, as well as Perl and Tcl that lets you automatically build and manage language environments/distributions for all major OS’s with a single toolchain.
The ActiveState Platform provides an alternative ecosystem for Python that offers a number of features and functionality over and above other Python distributions, including:
- Automated dependency resolution, including solutions to dependency conflicts. No more dependency hell.
- Automated notifications when a vulnerability is discovered, allowing you to quickly remediate and automatically rebuild a secure environment
- All packages and dependencies are built from source code, including linked C libraries, providing better security over using pre-built binaries.
There’s a bunch of other things that can help make your life easier as a professional Python Developer (including branching configurations, cross-platform scripting, eliminating “works only on my machine” issues, and more). For more information, read Python Package Management Guide for Enterprise Developers.
No, we only deal with open source language components, we don’t deal with your code. We can accommodate your proprietary Python packages/libraries if so desired, however.
You might want to use it to help other developers get up and running on your project quicker. We’ll copy over the code from your GitHub repo and install it together with the runtime environment it requires to run — all with a single command.
Not at all. For instance, if you prefer to work with pip, our CLI (the State Tool) will respect your pip commands and our hosted repository will allow you to install pre-built Python wheels.